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Joe, Gary, Jim, list,
>[Joe] Ben Says:
>>[Ben] I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct
and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that
question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question.
Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis
learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this
problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's
the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he
would have addressed it more aggressively.
>[Joe] REPLY:
>[Joe] I don't think Peirce overlooked anything like that, Ben. It
is just that verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry in the
way you think it is, and Peirce's approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesn't
mislead him into thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a
thing. Oh, well, one can of course explain about how publication works,
and how people are expected to respond to the making of research claims to do
what one can describe as "verifying" them. That would involve discussing
such things as attempts to replicate experimental results, which can no doubt
get complicated in detail owing to the fact that it would only rarely involve
exact duplication of experimental procedures and observations of results, the
far more usual case being the setting up of related but distinguishable lines of
experimentation whose results would have rather obvious implications for the
results claimed in the research report being verified or disverified, depending
on how it turns out. I don't think there would be anything very
interesting in getting into that sort of detail, though.
One might make similar remarks on abductive inference, which is
belief-laden and context-sensitive and would require getting into lots of
details and variation case by case. Note that the kind of hypotheses which
inferential statistics characteristically produces are "statistical hypotheses"
rather than explanatory ones, and it is not as if statisticians never had an
interest in the subject; a few years ago one statistician wrote here at peirce-l
about being interested in general approaches to the production of the content of
hypotheses which go beyond the usual statistical kind. Statistics deals with
phenomena in general and, though often applied in idioscopy, is not itself about
any special class of phenomena. Yet one does, in at least some
philosophy, attempt and pursue general
characterizations _of_ abductive inference and this is
because abductive inference is a logical process of a general kind and
is therefore part of philosophy's subject matter. Verification is also a
logical process of a general kind. The question is, is it some kind of
interpretation, representation, or objectification, or combination thereof? Or
is it something else?
Now there are two more questions here: Did Peirce think that verification
was important and determinational in inquiry? (Yes). Did Peirce think that
verification is a distinctive formal element in semiosis? (No.) Your discussion
of an emphasis on verification as reflecting a pathology of skepticism, a search
for infallible truth, etc., goes too far in de-valorizing verification,
certainly to the extent that you may be ascribing such a view to Peirce.
From the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce Vol. I, I. General Historical
Orientation, 1. Lessons from the History of Philosophy, Section 3. The Spirit of
Scholasticism, Paragraph 34, http://www.textlog.de/4220.html
66~~~
34. Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle(1) seems to
me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause of the success of modern
science when he has said that it was *_verification_*.
I should express it in this way: modern students of science have been successful
because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in
their laboratories and in the field; and while in their laboratories and in the
field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant eye, that is, in passive
perception unassisted by thought, but have been *_observing_* --
that is, perceiving by the aid of analysis -- and testing suggestions of
theories. The cause of their success has been that the motive which has carried
them to the laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things
really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not general propositions
actually held good -- which has overbalanced all prejudice, all vanity, and
all passion. Now it is plainly not an essential part of this method in general
that the tests were made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense
progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be explained by the same
intense interest in testing general propositions by particular cases -- only the
tests were applied by means of particular demonstrations. This is observation,
still, for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared -- algebra is a
science of the eye,(2) only it is observation of artificial objects
and of a highly recondite character. Now this same unwearied interest in testing
general propositions is what produced those long rows of folios of the
schoolmen, and if the test which they employed is of only limited validity so
that they could not unhampered go on indefinitely to further discoveries, yet
the *_spirit_*, which is the most essential thing -- the motive,
was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is from that of the major
part, though not all, of modern philosophers -- even of those who have
called themselves empirical, no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive.
~~~99 [bold & italics at the Website]
There Peirce is talking about the difference which verification has made,
and how a better kind and understanding and practice of verification has brought
modern science to its success. Can there be any serious doubt that Peirce
did indeed think that verification has a determinational role in inquiry, that
it settles questions in ways the support the further advance of inquiry?
Furthermore, general things can be said and understood, and fruitfully practiced
regarding verification, as shown by the fact, pointed out by Peirce, that the
modern students of science have understood the need to get into lab and
field. Evidently there is something general to be said about verification
even if, as in the case of abductive inference, general treatment beyond various
points lead to diminishing returns (for the generalist purpose) and to the
development of "field guides" about the process as practiced in various fields
of inquiry and areas of intelligent life. A process which is both
important and theory-unfriendly becomes more difficult to understand in a
general way, not less important to understand in a general way.
Mathematics is full of insoluble general problems; mathematicians then pay
attention also to patterns of insoluble general problems and the reasons for
them. There's still plenty to be understood in such cases. Through the gap
where truth was supposed to be, one may yet discern truth.
Peirce held that verification was important and
inquiry-determinational. Yet, and yet, Peirce did not think that
verification has a distinctive formal role in semiosis & inquiry, at least
such a role as to seat it alongside object, sign, and interpretant. Gary
asked me how Peirce and his interpreters could have missed such a thing, and my
response has been that I don't know. I point out that verification
involves, and is a kind of, experience/observation of a thing, and that sign and
interpretant convey information but not experience of the thing, so a
verification is not a sign or interpretant in those relations in which it is a
verification. My verification may be for another person merely a sign.
Scientists have reportedly verified that, on the large scale, space is
Euclidean. I accept that they've verified it under their standards,
standards which I acknowledge in a general way to be sound, I acknowledge that
the verification was not a fiat, etc., but, to me it's a only a sign that space
on a sufficiently large scale is Euclidean and I still wonder whether there is a
slight curvature insufficient for detection within the current limits of
observation. I do think that verification is defeasible. But my
verification is not, for me, merely a sign, but instead an experience,
conveyable across memory and time, and, as experience, supporting further signs
and interpretants, experience conveyed into the ongoing semiosis and helping
determine it. It itself has been determined logically by object, sign, and
interpretant, and determines semiosis going forward. In a commind uniting
various people's minds, experience, in an indirect way, is also communicated, as
when I take my friend's representation that there is a boat on the water as
_acquaintaince_ with the _fact_, at least, that there is a boat on
the water, even if I cannot observe the boat myself directly. As I've said
in the past, there is a certain amount of slack and experimentability with the
distinction between that which one recognizes as mere interpretation &
construal and that which one recognizes as establishment. The ways in
which one "makes" or learns through practice about the distinction are
themselves subject to verification which, as verification, embodies, preferably
but not necessarily in tame form, existential consequences. Here the
Peircean usually says or thinks, "but that's mere secondness." But I stand
by the tetradicity of reference by such an experience, have offered many an
argument for it, and ask anybody to refute those arguments directly. As to
secondness I point out that there is a big difference between an external force
imposed on a system, and a stable balance of a system's own internal
forces. This is a big difference as it parallels and is tied to the
difference between a system's linear energy and a system's rest energy (which is
proportional to the system's rest mass, its quantity of matter, in such a way
that it can be considered an equivalent way of expressing the quantity of
matter). That stable balance is manifested as a structure, and is a far
cry from the brute clash of the outside; it is that which suffers and stands up
to the clash, it is that which is borne out, it is the supportedeness, and, in
people, a stable rational balance is manifested as experience, the kind of
experience and verification which brings inquiry to a reasonable rest, basis,
foundation, upon which inquiry can soundly build.
Below, you point out that there is no act of verification which makes, upon
completion, an actual universal illuminant penetration through to all
minds. And you point out that a supposedly verified claim can be
disverified. I agree. But as I point out above, we learn more about
verification, standards of verification, etc., as we go along.
I'd say that you are the one who is giving in to a skepticism but are
calling it fallibilism. Obviously I don't think that the triad is worth
one's investing oneself in such a skepticism. I'm fallibilistic about
verification, but I don't think that it's merely interpretation.
First of all, the mind can recognize something as an interpretant and
recognize it as not being a verification and as not being verified. Second of
all, an interpretation narrows down from the universe represented by the sign,
but various singular (dis-)verifications are possible and necessary regarding
the interpretant. There is a singularness about experience, associated
with the existential consequentialness of putting an interpretant to the test
whether for deliberate verificative purpose or otherise. The idioscopic
study of experience as a class of phenomena -- the human & social studies --
deals with a lot of idiosyncrasies and singularness -- while the study of
motion and forces, all that 'brute secondness,' is physics, which is idioscopy's
most mathematical, general, and law-formulable area, studying objects which
we suppose to be most basic in the order of (concrete) being (as opposed
to the order of knowledge, etc.). As for the question of the importance of
verification, and why philosophers would or should care about it, which you
further deal with below, I think that I and, better, Peirce, have dealt with it
above. Likewise with the question of whether there's much of a general
character to be said about verification. People don't just become
satisfied with a lot of construal, a lot of interpretation. They don't, at
least when they're intelligent, do vague unaccountable "somethings" which
satisfy them, for reasons that no philosopher could care about. I don't
know why you would paint such a picture. If that's how some portion of
academics are behaving with regard to verification, your statement is a big
indictment, but I wouldn't call it a picture of a scientific intelligence, or
even of a common intelligence. To the contrary, people have and
sometimes seek experiences which bear upon the truth or falsity of the
interpretant sign, and this is important in inquiry and semiosis. They
even seek to check the interpretant, the sign which it interprets, etc., the
whole thing -- seeking, even if proven right, to know whether they were right
for the right reasons. Lots of general things can be said about
verification and about the relationship of experience to semiosis.
Now, it is quite natural to suppose that, having an interpretant but
insufficient experience of a thing, one would resort to experience collateral to
the interpretant in order to confirm the interpretant. Some
peirce-listers supposed so before I started to make such a big deal about
collateral experience (though what brought me to focus on the subject was not
that, but instead your later sending out all those collateral experience quotes
to peirce-l a few years ago; and still it took a while). And I think I've
shown many times that such is a good description of what people actually do --
resort to experience collateral to the interpretant in order to confirm or
corroborate the interpretant (or disconfirm, etc.).
>[Joe] I forgot to say something about the supposed problem of
distinguishing sense from nonsense. That's what the pragmatic maxim is all
about, isn't it? Tom' Short's take on this has to do with Peirce's
supposed failure to realize that his view of infinite interpretability entailed
an infinite deferral of sense being given to the initially senseless
symbol. In my view Tom doesn't understand what Peirce's view in the work
of the late 1860's actually is. I think I can establish pretty
persuasively that Peirce was, to put it mildly, a bit more sophisticated than
Tom credits him with being. It is really just a matter of understanding
what he meant by an "imputed quality" in defining the symbol in the New List,
which Tom finds too distastefully Lockean to be taken seriously; but it has to
be laid out and tediously tracked through text after text in order to put an end
to the sort of misreading of Peirce that Tom gives, which is what I am currently
completing. I don't see that it has anything to do with verification,
though. It is just a question of what his theory of meaning is.
As to what Tom Short was thinking and why he was thinking it, I can't say
whether it had more to do with an overdisinvestment in Lockean ideas or
with something else. I'm (unfortunately) just going by my memory that,
having read his article and all his posts (from which admit that I'm unprepared
to quote), I thought that he was indeed getting at a problem of semiosis's not
having a "move" for getting back into experience, and that he saw Peirce's
conception of the Ultimate Logical Interpretant, which Peirce said is "not a
sign," as a way of providing semiosis with such a "move." My view
(expressed at the time) was that I wasn't sure that Peirce really saw the
problem which Tom was discussing, but that the problem was real, was really the
problem of verification even if Tom didn't quite see it that
way, and that the Ultimate Logical Interpretant was the barest crack
in the door in the triadic "dome" (as I pictured it) which
seals semiotic growth off from experience and thereby leaves semiosis only
ways to "develop" but not ways to learn and evolve. Inquirers don't wait
for semiosis to evolve, bye and bye, into an interpretant which is no longer a
sign of its object, evolve into a generalized disposition, etc.; instead they
foreshorten the process, maintain the object reference, and test the
interpretant against the reality whereof the interpretant is a mere
construal. I don't see how one can have a theory of meaning (anything like
human or intelligent meaning) without a theory of experience and verification.
Questions of truth, soundness, validity, etc., add a good deal, pleasant &
unpleasant, to questions of value and meaning, as Hamlet learned, not only
suffering from uncertainties, but also from carrying out his commitment to act
decisively in logical consequence of the truth's establishment, the
establishment which he had committingly valued so highly. Poisonous
lying representations and interpretants poured into ears brought people to
grief; so did verifications; art and inquiry won't necessarily save
people. If we treat questions of verification as tiresome little technical
ones, they'll come back to bite us big-time, and they may do so even when we
take them as seriously as we can, though at least the odds thereof are
reduced.
Best, Ben http://tetrast.blogspot.com/
>[Joe] Take a common sense case of that. You tell me that you
observed something on the way over to my house to see me, e.g. a large fire at a
certain location, and I think you must have made a mistake since the edifice in
question is reputed to be fire-proof. So I mosey over there myself
to check it out and, sure enough, the fire is still going on at the place you
said. Claim verified. Of course, some third person hearing about
this might think we are both mistaken or in collusion to lie about it, and
having some financial interest in the matter, might not count my report as a
verification of your claim. So he or she might mosey over and find that we
were both confused about the location and there was no fire at the place
claimed. Claim disverified. But then some fourth person . .
. Well, you get the idea. So what is the big deal
about verification? (This is pretty much what Jim Piat was saying, too,
perhaps.)
>[Joe] The question is, why have philosophers of science so often gotten
all agitated about the problem of verification as if something really important
hinged on giving an exact account of what does or ought to count as such?
>[Joe] You tell me, but my guess is that it is just the age old and
seemingly insatiable but really just misguided quest for absolute and
authoritative certainty. Why this shows up in the form of a major
philosophical industry devoted to the production of theories of verification is
another matter, and I suppose that must be explained in terms of some natural
confusion of thought like those which make it seem so implausible at first that
we can get better control over our car when it goes into a skid if we turn the
car in the direction of the skid instead of by responding in the instinctively
reasonable way of trying to turn it in opposition to going in that unwanted
direction. Okay, not a very good example, but you know what I
mean: something can seem at first completely obvious in its reasonableness
that is actually quite unreasonable when all relevant considerations are taken
duly into account. some of which are simply too subtle to be detected as
relevant at first. Thus people argue interminably over no real
problem. It happens a lot, I should think.
>[Joe] In any case, a will-of-the-wisp is all that there is in the
supposed need for some general theory of verification. There is none to be
given nor is there any need for one. People make claims. Other
people doubt them or accept them but want to be sure and so they do something
that satisfies them, and others, noting this, are satisfied that the matter is
settled and they just move on. Of maybe nobody is ever satisfied. That's
life. Of course it can turn out at times that it is not easy to get
the sort of satisfacion that counts for us as what we call a verification
because it settles the matter in one way, or a dissatisfaction because it
settles it in a contrary way. But that is all there is to it. Maybe
there are fields or types of problems or issues in which the course of
experience of inquiry about them has resulted in the development and elaboration
of procedures that are regarded as having verification or disverification as
their normal result, but that will surely just be because that particular sort
of problem or subjectmatter happens to require analysis of a certain rather
complex kind involving a lot of detailed procedure. I don't know what can
lie at the end of it all, though, other than the fact, if it is a fact, that
people have finally had enough of it to not feel any need to do anything
further. That culminating de facto acceptance is of course always capable
of being mistaken. Such is the view of the fallibilist who is not a
pathological sceptic.
Joe Ransdell
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